When you draw thirty new buildings on the map of an erosion-prone area, that isn't urban planning - it is gambling with other people's safety. The civic initiative "Chance for Center" warns that the draft detailed urban plan for Barutana on Vodno provides for the construction of around 30 new buildings on the steep, erosion-prone terrain above Skopje.

The greatest irony is that the danger is admitted by the municipality itself - on paper. The area is already flagged in the Energy and Climate Plan of the Municipality of Center as threatened by erosion, with a recommendation to plant good-quality forest there rather than build. The project documentation demands erosion-protection measures. Yet the plan itself, the initiative says, contains no such measures - no protection against erosion, fires or flash floods. So the risk is officially recorded, but the solution for it - nowhere.

This is not an abstract fear. Vodno has already shown what building on unstable terrain does: landslides occurred at the Children's Clinic and at the Tasino Češmiče hotel. These are not hypotheses but a price already paid. The question is why someone now wants the same mistake repeated on an even bigger scale.

And the answer, as usual, leads to ownership. The plan, according to the initiative, comes from a private company whose land had previously been earmarked for state institutions - now converted into private residential development. Public interest became a private building venture, while the risk of landslides and fires stays - public. When something goes wrong on that terrain, the company won't pay the bill; the city will.

The initiative is calling for the plan to be withdrawn and a new one drawn up, one that repairs the earlier damage instead of creating new. From the Municipality of Center and the City, there is so far no response. And silence, when it comes to building on an erosion-prone slope above a city, is never neutral - it is a decision in itself.